The Academy has agreed to support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which recognises the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated.
The general recommendation is not to use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, or to assess an individual scientist's contributions.
Changes will shortly be made to the various documents associated with the Academy's grants schemes and Fellowship nominations processes, to bring them into line with the Declaration.